Cecil Rhodes gazes down on Liam Fox at the Department for International Trade. A map of 18th-century Europe graces the wall at the headquarters of the Brexit secretary, David Davis. At the Foreign Office, Boris Johnson toils before the watchful eye of a Winston Churchill bust. For the government ministers dubbed the “Three Brexiteers”, it seems that inspiration is to be found in Britain’s imperial glories.

The trio’s stirring choices of artwork now form the backdrop to Britain’s greatest political upheaval since the second world war. The works have been revealed after a freedom of information request by the Observer for the names of items transferred from the government art collection, after Theresa May’s arrival at Downing Street last year saw the creation of Fox’s and Davis’s departments.

At Davis’s base, 9 Downing Street, he enters the increasingly choppy waters of Brexit negotiations in Brussels surrounded by a distinctively maritime theme. He has ordered 34 works from the government’s collection including T Wright’s Shipping – Paddle Boat off Dover, William Marlow’s Hulks at Sheerness and John Tunnard’s Rocks at Sea.

To focus his mind further, there are also 10 copperplate engravings of scenes from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – originally produced for a 1929 edition of the Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem – featuring scenes from the tale of a lost soul condemned to wander the globe following a disastrous voyage.

Two maps are among other intriguing choices at the Department for Exiting the European Union. One is A New Map of Europe, a colour engraving by Michael Burghers, the 17th-century Dutch illustrator, depicting a continent carved up along national lines three years after the nine years war, and Map of Northern Germany by Theodorus Danckerts, showing the core territory of Prussia in the run-up to its emergence as one of the great powers.

The sole portrait at the department is that of George Canning, a so-called “lost leader” of the Tory party, and a figure whom Davis might view as a political ancestor. Credited by some historians with detaching Britain from alliances with autocratic European powers in favour of focusing on Britain’s global imperial ambitions, he served as prime minister for only 119 days before his death in office in 1827.

Reminders of the buccaneering spirit of Britain’s imperial past, meanwhile, loom large at the Department for International Trade – where Fox is attempting to use Brexit as a springboard for stronger trading links with Commonwealth countries in a project others have called “Empire 2.0”. Among 61 artworks at the new department are seven images from Matthew Bishop’s The Making of the Modern World series based on stamps from Gibraltar, Montserrat, the Falklands and Pitcairn islands as well as the tax havens of the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and the Virgin Islands.

Fox, an ardent free marketeer and the most hardline of the “Three Brexiteers”, selected 61 artworks, including depictions of the Great Exhibition – the 1851 showcase of the modernity and technological scope of the British empire – and early 19th-century scenes from London’s commercial centre at a time when Britain was transforming itself into the world’s first industrial economy. Elsewhere a lithograph of British imperialist Cecil Rhodes hangs with the 19th-century German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, Gladstone and Queen Victoria. Portraits at Fox’s department include one of William Huskisson, the Tory free trade advocate who earned an unfortunate place in history as the first man to be killed by a train.

The list indicates that only three new works have been installed at the Foreign Office during Johnson’s often fraught tenure as foreign secretary. Memories of happier times as the mayor of London might at least come from one of them, Simon Patterson’s lithograph The Great Bear, a map of the tube network with the station names replaced by those of philosophers, actors, politicians and other celebrated figures.

Johnson’s hand is also discernible in the choice of a 1946 bust of Churchill, the subject of a biography by the MP and a figure to whom he is believed to liken himself. Johnson turned a similar Churchill bust – created by Jacob Epstein – into a political football in 2016 when he accused Barack Obama of removing it from the Oval Office and cited it as evidence of “the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British empire”.

The truth was more complicated. Having been loaned to George W Bush as a personal gift from Tony Blair, it was replaced by a bust of Martin Luther King Jr by Obama and was sent back to the British embassy in line with normal protocol. Another bust, also by Epstein, that was “restored” to the Oval Office under Donald Trump, is not the one loaned by Blair, but one the White House has had since the 1960s and which had been displayed in the private residence.